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2.5

This was a series that I went in to with middling expectations, and then ended up enjoying more than I thought I would - even though it never quite fully escaped 3-star territory. At the end of the third book I was on tenterhooks for find out what happens and how it all gets resolved, and I waited until I could read books 4 and 5 back-to-back and then...

I don't know, it just kinda fizzled.

The pacing of this story was really odd, and some of the choices even odder. Some of the 'character choices' seemed just plot-devices to keep the story moving, filling out time and pages, until we finally got to the ending.

I said this once back in book three and I'm even firmer in my opinion now - this should've been a trilogy. There's easily a trilogy worth of story here, but, unfortunately, it's filled out to fill five books and it ends up just feeling off and underwhelming, in the end.

Another downer for this book is that what made me love the first book was the growing relationships between these characters who don't fit in, and don't really like each other, at first, and then grow to become allies and friends and, eventually, family.

But due to the 'war' aspect of this book, and the characters having grown into their separate roles, they mostly end up in different parts of the story, away from each other, for most of the book.

Also, the perspective shifts are part of the aforementioned oddness. We would spend time with one character for awhile, and then switch to a different character and part of the war, but time still moves forward. But then we go back to the first character and find out all this interesting stuff had happened off-page and it's like, what? Why did you tell us pages of boring shit and then exposition us with something that happened off-screen?

Like I said - there's just some really odd choices made in this book, both with the pacing and with the plot, and I ended up feeling disappointed and underwhelmed.

There's a part of me that wants to blame it on quarantine-brain, so maybe I'll give this series another chance some day when I can read them all back-to-back. Maybe it was just the time between books and the waiting and high expectations which did me in, in the end.